


Sinked Skin

by saturnsage



Category: Fallen Hero Series - Malin Rydén
Genre: Grief/Mourning, Hallucinations, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-01
Updated: 2019-02-01
Packaged: 2019-10-20 14:13:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17623916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saturnsage/pseuds/saturnsage
Summary: He sees you on a street the very same week after you died. The only problem he could find with that is how as soon as he ran to touch your arm, you weren't there.(Or, how ghosts can kill someone off more than you think.)





	Sinked Skin

**Author's Note:**

> i've been crying over ortega for only a couple of weeks but it feels like it's been three years

  
 1. He thinks you’re growing too familiar a sight, for someone who’s been dead for so long, but maybe that’s just the drink talking. Maybe that’s just the desperation that’s ripping at his throat, and maybe that’s just those skipped heart-beats talking. 

You’re in the Hoots this time, wearing a button-up shirt that’s definitely not buttoned up enough, and maybe your skin’s a little darker, and maybe your hair’s a little neater, but hey, it’s you, isn’t it?  

Right now, he’s nothing if not dead-set, stumbling through the patrons of the bar and maybe nudging one too many chairs, and uncaring if the half-drunk whiskey in his hand spills all over his shirt, because you’re here, sitting at the bar and nursing a sweating beer and  _not looking at him._

The light-headedness should be enough of a red-flag, but he’s always ignored those in favor of you. He should have stayed in place, admiring from a distance, satisfied that at least you’re here, but he’s never been able to stay away from you for too long.

He grabs your shoulder lightly, because you hate being touched, he remembers that, and he croaks out a light “God, there you are,” because here you are, right?

But you aren’t there. ( _“Ricardo, look at me! Look at me! He’s_ ** _dead_** _, okay? He’s_ ** _gone_** _-)_

The other not-you stares at him, and he mumbles out a “Shit, sorry. Wrong person.” and he doesn’t wait for a response to turn around, dump the empty glass, and get the fuck out of there. Ignore the fact he’s spilled the rest of the whiskey on his shirt. He never did care about his appearance around you, because you never cared about that kind of stuff.   
  
He goes home. He doesn’t change, and he falls on the bed.   
  
“God, there you were,” he says to you. It’s slurred. It’s his goodnight prayer.  
  


______________

  
2\. “Mr. Ortega, sir, could you be experiencing something you’re not telling me about?”   
  
He fidgets, and his eyes sharpen, and he slides his gaze toward the doctor sitting across to him. “What do you mean? I’ve told you everything.”   
  
His therapist smiles, a little sad, a little patient. “You’re looking at something behind me, even though it’s just a wall.”

  
It’s because you’re there, obviously. It’s the same blank look he last saw you wear, and you only blink once. You put a hand on the therapist’s chair, and you stare.  ‘Idiot,’ you mouth, and his throat clogs.

“I should have saved some photos of him,” he blurts out. “he-he hated cameras so much, but I should have at least had one.”   
  
“And why do you think so?”   
  
You don’t move. You don’t smile. Idiot.

“I don’t know. Fuck, I forget what he looked like when he smiled.”

___

 

3\. ( “ _Ricardo, fucking look at me when I speak to you! Pull yourself together, he_ ** _fell_** _, he’s_ ** _not coming back._** _God damnit, he thought you were stronger than this-)_

_( “You can’t die if you were never alive to begin with, right? Promise me you won’t miss me.”_ **_no no stop no no NO OH GOD NO NONONONO_ ** _)_

 

_____

_  
_ 4 _._ The memories always come back.  Every time. Routine, he guesses. He can’t be Charge without those things clawing at his back, you know? It’ll be like a betrayal. It’ll be like accepting you’re actually gone, and then where would he be? Rounding forty, and with crow’s feet and smile lines? And you, neutral, clawed-at face, not even halfway to thirty? And you, nothing but a speck on the ground when he finally looked down?

No. That’ll be like leaving you all over again.   
  
So. He talks about you, and a lot too. Every time he does he can see Wei stiffening, and that’s okay because he doesn’t care what Wei thinks about you anymore, and he continues to sit on the kitchen countertop, eating a glazed donut.   
  
“Sidestep would inhale these babies every time we came back from a mission,” He says, and the blond kid swerves in his seat, stars already in his eyes, face stuffed with something that looks like chips. It’s encouragement enough, despite Wei’s already darkening face. Angie’s unresponsive, snoring her head off on one of the lounge couches.

“He could pop  a dozen of these in less than five minutes. Once, we tried to see how many he could eat in a minute, and it went-“ A sideways-glance to Chen, who was nose-deep in some papers he brought in with him. “-As well as could be expected.”   
  
The blond kid laughs breathlessly, grinning. It’s no secret the rookie’s a fan of yours. You probably would have been annoyed the hell out of him. As for Ortega? Well. It’s nice to be able to talk to someone about you without worrying about the shadows that mentions of you seem to summon.   
  
“What happened?” Herald asks, near pleading for more information. Ortega grins in return, and chomps another bite of a donut. Chews at it for a bit, before answering.   
  
“He ate around four before _someone_  barged into the kitchen, scaring the hell out of us. Sidestep started choking, and I panicked and hit his back so hard he fell to the ground. Turns out Steel doesn’t know CPR, because he just walked away.”   
  
Herald giggles, and Wei shoots an ‘Are you fucking kidding me’ look, before rustling the papers again and taking a sip of coffee, brows furrowed.   
  
“Oh my gosh,” Herald says, delighted, chips forgotten, “That’s amazing.”

“Yeah,” He says, and the smile turns strained.   
  
He doesn’t say the “ _You_   _really were.”,_ because that would kill the mood, and because he needs this. He needs someone to remember you, think of you in that way he did before everything was gone. A marker, if you will. A ‘ _Hey, he was good. He wasn’t just dead and good, he was alive and good.’_

Angie’s snores cut off any form of communication, and he gets back to the donut, suddenly not hungry anymore.

___

 

5\. ( His heart thumps, and he’s scared, and he’s relieved, because you’re giving him a loopy smile, the one you give him when you’ll be okay.   
  
     It was so close, wasn’t it? Something about how close you were to getting hurt beyond repair makes his heart screech, makes sirens blare in his brain, and all he can think about is  _holy shit I love you too much to have let that be the end for you_  
  
    You’re stuck under all that rubble, so he pulls you out as well as he can, and places you in his lap, and you give out a small puff of breath. You still have that loopy smile on your face, and your eyes are clear.    
  
     “I’ve never kissed a man before,” He admits, because he’s still scared, because he’s still relieved.   
  
      You nod ever so slightly at that, and your eyes sparkle. “ ~~You’re gonna regret this,” You say in a dream.~~  And he leans in and oh, you’re warm, aren’t you? Your tender and small, when he kisses you for the first time.   
  
It was barely a press, barely a whisper, before he breaks it off, and you hold his cheek with you uninjured hand so he doesn’t go too far.  
  
“Ha,” You wheeze, teasing. And you pull his mouth to yours again, and this time you aren’t so tender and small, and oh, he’s drowning, isn’t he?)

  
  
And when he wakes up, he regrets that he didn’t do it back where everyone could see, so no one could have hurt you.   
  
___  
  
6\.  He’s awake in someone else’s bed in the middle of the night, the woman whose name he forgot sleeping too deeply to notice him sitting at the edge of the bed, staring at where you sit on the windowsill.   
  
Your eyes melt into the black night, and your face still bleeds from where you’ve clawed at it, from when that little girl looked at you and said ‘ **We Are The Same** ’ and made you fall to your knees and scream.   
  
There’s scars on your hands, and there’s the same bulk you had back when you were still alive. You look just like you, except the night makes you look more angular, more lined, more…something. You don’t smile. You never do.   
  
“I still love you.” Ortega whispers, and you don’t blink.   
  
“You were always so stubborn.” You say. And you leave, just like that. You stand up, and you take a step back, and you fall down the window. He closes his eyes, and runs his hands through his curls.

The woman shifts around in the bed, sighing lightly. He doesn’t look. All he sees is the moon, and his reflection from the window.   
  
When did it become so hard for him to look at himself? Probably when he couldn’t see you next to him, or something like that. 

 

( _“Sidestep…? You doing okay? Its over, you took care of the girl. …Hey…”_ )  
  
( ** _GET AWAY FROM THERE WHAT ARE YOU DOING_** )

  
___  
  
7\. Angie beats up Herald, and blows up buildings, and runs from the police, and hurts civilians. Really, it’s not much out of the ordinary, until finally when Wei finally sees her rag-dolling on a dumpster pile, he grabs her by the shoulder and yells for a damn explanation.   
  
Her voice is weak, and that’s when Ortega knows something is wrong.   
“I don’t know what the  _hell_  you’re talking about,” She starts, and then she looks around, and her eyes widen, and her voice raises, and there’s the faint cries of LDPD sirens in the horizon, Wei lets her drop to her feet, and she stumbles, and that’s when Ortega knows  _something is wrong. “_ What the fuck, what the fuck just happened to me, I-“ 

Angie looks shaken. Wei’s face blanches.

The problem here is that Wei doesn’t trust Angie. She’s got too much vigilante blood running through her, and she’s too deviating. She doesn’t pull punches when she should and every time there’s a hostage situation, she goes straight for the people with guns, not for those who are being held by gunpoint.   
  
She’s too strong, and she’s too aware of that fact. She’s restless. She’s sharp. She’s what probably could have happened to you if you actually accepted joining the Rangers. She’s not a liability. She’s supposed to know what she’s doing.   
  
And yet she’s here, in this backstreet alley, not knowing  _why_  she’s here, and she’s worried.

  
Ortega already knows what Wei is thinking. He wants to deny it, but he isn’t as dumb as people may think. At least, not where it matters most.   
  
“Call in the ambulance,” Wei says to some backup sentries, all military poise and bark, “Get her out of here. Then call in the telepathic specialists. There’s an Alpha-level telepath mucking around and i’m going to  _hunt them down_.”   
  
Angie doesn’t even protest, which is answer enough. The sirens grow louder, and all he can think is  _you would have known what to do._  
  


“Chen,” He says, quiet. Ragged. Wei looks toward him, and the hardness of his face softens. Ortega gives him a look, and Wei’s face further turns into concern. “I can’t do this again, I think.”   
  
Wei says nothing at first, rather watching a sentry a kevlar netting around Angie, who promptly blacked out beforehand. Then he sighs.   
  
“We don’t have a choice.”   
  
____

  
  
8\. ( **“We Are The Same.”  
**    
     _“Let me help you.”_  
  
   “ **Why Do You Survive Like This?”  
**   
  “I don’t have a choice.” )

 __  
  
___

9\. He’s not where he’s supposed to be. He’s supposed to be at the shrink’s, but if he has to deal with more questions that he can’t answer, he’ll start banging his head on the wall.   
  
Instead, he just ran. Nowhere in particular. Just running.   
  
Because it’s nice, you know, to run when he’s been standing his own ground for so long. He tried running away before, a week after you died. It didn’t work out. He kept running left, when he should have been running right.   
  
This time, he’s running as far as he can from HQ, because if he has to deal with the wounded blonde kid kicking himself for his naivety, and if he has to deal with Angie’s increasingly paranoid temper flares, he might just lose it. He already has too much tension in his own body, see. If he tries to fit more in, everything he keeps stored in will push out, and that will be it.   
  
He’s running to make himself focus on something that isn’t on helping Angie with…whatever she’s going through. Ortega doesn’t have a clue about the ways of telepathy, so he can’t really offer a hand. Wei knows a thing or two, but just asking him to talk about it leads to an argument Ortega always loses. The only one who could ever win arguments with him was Anathema, and…shit.   
  
Why does everything have to be such a mess? It’s been seven years, and the aftershocks still keep coming.

He loses his breath when he realizes his playlist stopped playing music, and he lets himself take a break, soak up his surroundings. It’s on the poor side of the city, where the families with too many kids and not enough bedrooms live, and where petty crimes are a hassle to deal with. He doesn’t know the street, not as much as he should.   
  
There’s an outside diner a block away, and it looks as cozy as anything can get around these parts. There may be something to drink. Water, at least.

We walks over, legs liquid and sore from running for so long, and blearily, -because nobody’ll recognize him in this area- waits at the end of a mediocre sized line, and wondering, what you would have said if you saw him here.

  
It’s a dumb thought. It’s a terrible thought.   
  
He looks around, so drained that he barely processes anything. It’s always like this when he’s out of shift and out of public-eye. It’s using up more and more energy to keep pretending that his shit-eating grin is still genuine.

He sees you, sitting on one of the plastic tables, eating something that looks like cake. This time, you look older, hunched, as tired and aching as he feels. You look lonely and you don’t smile. You’re wearing something a little too warm for this kind of weather, and your auburn hair is shorter and even less-brushed than usual.

His heart pangs, and he looks away. God, there you are.   
  
He already knows if he looks again, you’ll be gone and there’ll be a different person that resembles you somehow sitting there, or you’ll be staring right at him. Eyes blank, face scarred, hands shaking. ‘ _Idiot_.’

He shouldn’t look again. That’s what his therapist tells him to do. Don’t look back, don’t look at the past and think what if, all that fun stuff.   
  
But, he never did get the knack for staying away from you for too long, right? He never did learn how to forget you, how to not walk into a room and search for you out of everything and everyone else.

  
He looks back. You don’t disappear, and you don’t stare back.  
  
He blinks. 

  
  
_(“I can’t look at you for too long,” You say, nose scrunched up, “It’s like looking at the damn sun. Ugh.”_  
  
“I think I love you,” He says, half-joking, because that’s what you do. You two joke.   
  
“Uh-huh,” You say, unimpressed. “Ha.”)

 

You’re still there.

  
  
He rubs his face and takes a step forward. 

  
  
You’re still there. 

  
  
No. This can’t. It  _can’t._

_  
It_ **_can’t._ **

 

His breath hitches. “Jae-Sun…?” He asks, loud enough to be heard.

  
  
And you look up, confused and surprised. A frown etched on your face, your eyes clear.

 

And you see him, and he sees you recognize him, and he sees you lost for words, mouth open, blinking rapidly. 

  
  
And then, he sees you smile. 

  
  
“Ricardo,” You say, voice rough and coarse, but nonetheless warm.

  
God, there you are.


End file.
